Southern Indiana Living - Jan / Feb 2021

Making a Difference
Brandon’s House Counseling
Local non-profit offers much needed mental health services to teens at no cost
16 • Jan/Feb 2021 • Southern Indiana Living
Story by Darian Eswine
Photo by Michelle Hockman (page 17) // Quorthon1 / shutterstock.com(page 16)
Founded in 1993, Brandon’s
House Counseling was, is and
will always be a place to provide
much-needed mental
health services to teens at no cost to
their families.
Susan Parr created the counseling
center as part of her master’s degree
project before graduation. She
realized there was a gap for a lot of
people seeking services who either
had insurance that limited the services
they could receive, couldn’t afford
the co-pay or didn’t have insurance
and couldn’t afford the out-of-pocket
cost for therapy.
Parr was working with a young
man at the time who had witnessed
his father murder his mother. What
was obviously a very traumatic event
was made worse because he had a lot
of limits to the care he could receive
to aid his healing process.
Parr saw that and realized it just
wasn’t right, so she partnered with individuals
in the community and with
Depauw United Methodist Church
in New Albany to create Brandon’s
House.
“We officially serve 13- to
19-year-olds,” director Kathleen Randelia
said. “We will make some exceptions
generally on the younger
end of that for siblings, for example.
It’s a case-by-case basis.”
For the past 27 years, Randelia,
who became the director in 2018 after
Parr retired, said they have focused
on providing mental health counseling
in a professional manner to as
many people as they can at no cost to
families.
“We provide outpatient therapy,
individual and family therapy for
the most part. There are times where
we’ll do group therapy, career counseling
or couples counseling,” Randelia
said. “We don’t do crisis intervention
where if someone is having
a mental crisis they would call us.
We always refer to hospitals or other
agencies that do that. We are exclusively
outpatient.”
One of the things Randelia
makes sure clients understand is that
even though they are getting free
care, the staff is equally professional
and educated and they stick with
the state and national guidelines for
mental health practices.
With COVID-19 affecting everyone
in different ways, Randelia said it
has greatly affected the teens her team
works with and their well-being. At
the beginning of the pandemic, they
switched to telehealth appointments
exclusively. In June, they transitioned
back to in-person only to switch back
to telehealth in November.
“At one point, we had 40 individuals
on our waiting list. It really
spiked,” Randelia said. “Mental
Health Association sent out a State of
Mental Health Report and their 2020
data showed a marked increase in